The globe is cooling (what it does when it’s not warming)

From Stephen Goddard at Real Science last May (h/t Bob Carter) came this astounding climate forecast from Dr Leona Libby in 1979, just as the global warming scare was starting out.

I’m not sure it’s tracked the actual climate tremendously closely, but there are strong indications (from several horrendously cold northern winters and this last miserable southern summer) that cooling is the new trend.

Libby’s forecast would bear much wider study instead of being ignored for the man-centric theory du jour. Anecdotal evidence and observation suggest this forecast hasn’t been refuted by the theory of dangerous anthropogenic emissions-induced global warming.

On the contrary, the evidence this century is irrefutable that natural variation has been overwhelming the undetectable anthro influence.

7 Thoughts on “The globe is cooling (what it does when it’s not warming)”

Leona Marshall Libby (1919 – 1986)….. On a professional front, Libby’s interests had changed a bit and she began studying cosmology, which is the study of the physical universe. She was especially excited when she discovered that tree rings could measure ancient climates. In 1970, although still living in Boulder, Libby became a visiting professor at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Engineering, where she helped develop the department of environmental science and engineering. She left Boulder two years later to move to Los Angeles and become an adjunct professor there.

“Proceeding on the assumption that climate varies in a cyclic, repetitive way”

The trick though, is determining which cycle is the one to watch and then observing when the critical inflexion has occurred. Since early 2010 all we’ve been observing is negative inter-decadal oscillation but ENSO is entering neutral territory that should halt the recent cooling and may even turn positive this year (but for how long?).

The question is: will the MEI (see link) enter a prolonged predominantly negative phase similar to 1950 – 1977?

But that (1950 – 1977) was only 27 yrs and there was a 30 yr positive phase following so that’s a multi-decadal cycle.

A prolonged 30 yr negative MEI would be compounded by a negative phase in a multi-century scale cycle said by astrophysicists to kick in c. 2014 that may last 70 yrs.

All consistent with Dr Libby’s prediction except she was a bit premature (like J. McLean). The first thing to look for is a return to the 90s regime but I think it will take until 2014 for that to be evident even though I believe the critical inflexion in the century scale cycle has already occurred around the time Dr Libby predicted cooling. She didn’t account for the other cycles operating however.

The El Niño (warm East Pacific tropical water temperatures) / La Niña (cold East Pacific tropical water temperatures) phenomenon is known to occur in a quasi-cyclic fashion repeating every 2-7 years. It is the leading reason for the global variation in temperatures and precipitation on an interannual time scale. Conceptual models and general circulation models (GCMs) have been used to hypothesize that El Niño may arise as a result of internal non-linear processes.

A paper by White and Liu (2008) finds that El Niño / La Niña pairs may be “phase locked” to the quasi-decadal oscillation (QDO), which is linked to the 11-year solar cycle. Phase locking means that two different harmonics vary in the same way with respect to each other. The simplest example of this is pure “constructive” or “destructive” interference. Specifically, White and Liu performed harmonic analysis as a diagnostic on a time series of Pacific region sea surface temperatures (SSTs) from 1895-2005. They also gathered 110 years of data from a multi-century run of a coupled atmosphere-ocean GCM corresponding to the observations. And what did they find?

Molchanov of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of the Physics of the Earth — which is headquartered in Moscow, Russia — makes a case for the hypothesis that, at least partially, global climate changes and corresponding activity indices such as the ENSO phenomenon are induced by similar variations in seismicity.” This was done by (1) calculating the cumulative annual seismic energy released by large earthquake events originating from depths of 0 to 38 km, based on data archived by the U.S. Geological Survey for the 35-year time interval of 1973-2008 for various earthquake activity zones spread across the tropical and western Pacific — including the Chilean subduction zone, the Tonga-Kermadec zone, the Sunda, Philippine, Solomon Sea zones and the Mariana, Japan and Kuril-Kamchatka zones — and (2) comparing the then-evident periodicity of seismic energy production with that of sea surface temperature oscillations that occurred over the same 35-year period within the Niño zones 1+2 (0-10°S, 90-80°W), 3 (5°N-5°S, 150-90°W), and 4 (5°N-5°S, 160°E-150°W).

Based on their analysis, it was determined, first of all, that (1) the “climate indices show expected ENSO variation,” and “amazingly,” as Molchanov describes it, that (2) the earthquake indices demonstrate “similar quasi-ENSO variations.” So the next questions were obviously: (1) which is the action? … and (2) which is the reaction? From a number of other factors considered by the Russian researcher, he concludes that it is “more probable” that earthquake activity is “forcing the ENSO variation in the climate” than vice versa.

An Example Of The Reasons That Skillful Multi-Decadal Predictions Of Climate Change Has Not Been Achieved – “Long Tails In Regional Surface Temperature Probability Distributions With Implications For Extremes Under Global Warming” By Ruff and Neelin 2012